The futures of globalization

This analysis of the futures of globalization has the following general features. First, it draws on the work of Michel Foucault to place the body and populations at the centre of any picture of the future, and hence this discussion will deal extensively with medical technology, population changes, ageing demographic structures, disease and drugs (Turner 2004). One problem with Foucault’s theory was the lack of a genuine political economy, namely a concern for governmentality in terms of pension funds, investment in regenerative medicine, research budgets for stem cell development and so forth. By combining Foucault and the political economy of ageing and resources, it is possible to develop a general framework for a neo- Malthusian sociology of globalization that attempts to grasp the interconnections between the following conditions: waste, environmental damage and the depletion of natural resources; the growth of radical politics, new wars and the alienation of youth; the growing importance of human rights responses to failed states and civil war; and the centrality of religious imagination and religious violence to global change. The aim is to understand how the changing structure of populations has interacted with capitalist markets to produce a new age of violence, and hence a key component of the future of globalization must be to consider the emergence of dystopic cosmologies, that will resemble the depraved consciousness of plagueridden medieval society or the extraordinary baroque mentality of the Post- Reformation world